About

Melinda Lopez is a playwright, actress, and educator. She is the inaugural playwright-in-residence at the Huntington Theatre Company and a past Huntington Playwriting Fellow. Her play Sonia Flew (Elliot Norton and IRNE Awards, dir. Nicholas Martin) inaugurated the Huntington's home for new work, the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, in 2004. It has subsequently been produced at Coconut Grove Playhouse, the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Laguna Playhouse, the Summer Playwrights Festival (NY), the Milagro Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and many others, and was broadcast on NPR's "The Play's The Thing!" Other plays include Caroline in Jersey(Williamstown Theatre Festival), Orchids to Octopi (IRNE Award, Central Square Theatre, commissioned by the National Institute of Health), Gary (Steppenwolf's First Look Repertory of New Work, Boston Playwrights Theatre), Alexandros (Laguna Playhouse), a new translation of Blood Wedding (Suffolk University), God Smells Like A Roast Pig (Women on Top Festival, Elliot Norton Award — Outstanding Solo Performance), Midnight Sandwich / Medianoche (Coconut Grove Playhouse), The Order of Things (CentaStage, Kennedy Center Fund for New Plays), How Do You Spell Hope? (Underground Railway Theatre), and Becoming Cuba (Huntington Theatre Company and North Coast Repertory Theatre). She is among the first cohort to receive three-year-playwright-in-residency grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and was the first recipient of the Charlotte Woolard Award, given by the Kennedy Center to a "promising new voice in American Theatre."

As an actress, Ms. Lopez previously appeared at the Huntington inOur Town,Persephone, A Month in the Country, and The Rose Tattoo. Other credits include The Motherf**ker with the Hat, Anna in the Tropics and Theatre District (SpeakEasy Stage Company), Oil Thief and A Girls War (Boston Playwrights’ Theatre), Romeo and Juliet (Portland Stage), and Many Colors Make the Thunder-king (Guthrie Theater). She is featured in the movie Fever Pitch. She has appeared in regional theatres across the country and also works in film and radio. She has served as a panel member for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Cambridge Arts Panel and has enjoyed residencies with Sundance, the Lark, the New York Theatre Workshop, and Harvard University.

Ms. Lopez teaches theatre and performance at Wellesley College and playwriting at Boston University. She is a founding member of Munroe Saturday Nights, which produces free high quality arts performances in the Boston area, and makes her home in Boston, where she is active in the Cuban American community and helps with local charities to bring humanitarian aid to to Cuba. In her free time, she enjoys long distance running, back country hiking, and sneaking into movie matinees on rainy days with her daughter.